The Dveri Movement Through a Discursive Lens. Serbia’s Contemporary Right-Wing Nationalism

Abstract

Twenty-first century Serbian nationalism has had little serious analysis. Most works concentrate heavily on the nineties and the wars of Yugoslav secession, which produced a wide variety of rampant forms of nationalism throughout former Yugoslavia. Since 5 October 2000, right-wingers have somewhat softened their line in public discourse and lost some of their popular appeal, but strong nationalist tendencies have remained, taking their place in Serbia’s social and political discourses. These tendencies have been concentrated around certain extreme right-wing groups, chief among them Dveri srpske, which has been active since the early nineties. After organizing itself politically, this movement has refurbished its image and discourse, and, in the April 2016 elections, has even succeeded in entering parliament. Here, the author analyses Dveri’s agenda and key convictions: antisemitism, an anti-EU stance, support for Putin’s Russia, clericalism, and homophobia. He also reviews Dveri’s change of image and discourse over time.

The Ideological Recomposition of Political Elites in Serbia since 2012

“…Does it signal a return to nationalist behaviours? 'Virulent nationalism', that which 'rejects the status quo and seeks to reaffirm the will of a community imagined in a political or cultural space' (Bieber 2018b: 2) is (still) the prerogative of several groups of right -wing extremists since the start of the new millennium (see Jovanović 2018). Given the qualitative and quantitative makeup of the opposition in the Serbian parliament, the current political regime could hardly be called 'competitive authoritarianism', the very one that dominated the Western Balkan countries throughout the 1990s (see Bieber 2018a).…”

Antisemitism and Homophobia in Polish Liberal Discourses: The Cultural Logic of Comparison and a Proposal for Intersectionality

“…Such analogy making was not, however, only confined to Poland and also observed in e.g. Hungary (Renkin 2009) or Serbia (Jovanović 2018). Of course, the strong political prevalence of a dominant Church (be it Catholic or Orthodox) may seemingly act as a catalyst facilitating such comparisons due to well documented historical antisemitism, and clear aversion to homosexuality within the ranks of Church officials.…”

A New Political Scarecrow? The Political Program and Activity of the ”Serbian Right“

“…Vučić himself is increasingly referred to as a dictator in the media (Eror, 2019) and semi-authoritarian in scholarship (Radeljić, 2019), and the country's freedoms have started to erode manifestly, arguably most notably in the domain of the increasingly restricted freedom of the press (FreedomHouse, 2016(FreedomHouse, , 2017Jovanović, 2018c;Kmezic, 2018). The protests against his regime have seen some scant interest within the academic community (Fridman & Hercigonja, 2017;Jovanović, 2019a), including rare pieces on the development of Serbia's Right Wing through the decades (Jovanović, 2018b). The new instances of right-wing organizing, nonetheless, yet remain to have some scholarly light shed on them.…”